Exhiled Afghan Official Vows To Repatriate Stolen Treasures — Including A 1,200-Year-Old Siddur

Abdul Manan Shiway e-Sharq, former Deputy Minister for Information and Publications of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, before the Taliban takeover. Photo courtesy of Sharq

Abdul Manan Shiway e-Sharq arrived safely in Munich on Feb. 17 — seven harrowing months after Taliban jihadis seized power in Kabul. From Germany, the former Deputy Minister for Information and Publications of the democratically elected Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is continuing his campaign to safeguard his country’s multicultural heritage — and repatriate looted antiquities.

Foremost on his list of missing cultural artifacts are:

— the priceless Bactrian gold housed in the Arg presidential place in Kabul, not seen since the Taliban reestablished the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in September.

— an invaluable medieval Hebrew-language “siddur” (“prayer book”), which disappeared from Kabul’s National Museum sometime after 1998 and is now in the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.

— and some 4,500 relics discovered last year by Chinese miners in the Logar province at Mes Aynak, home to a fifth-century complex of Buddhist monasteries and temples but also one of the world’s largest copper deposits.

Given the specter of starvation haunting Afghanistan — on Nov. 11, 2021, Human Rights Watch reported the country’s 34 provinces were facing widespread famine due to the country’s economic and banking crisis – Sharq, 39, considers himself lucky. Having survived an assassination attempt in 2020 at the gates of Kabul University, where he had organized a book fair, Sharq and his family — wife Farzana, daughters Farwadin and Otusa, and son Kawa — are now living in a refugee hostel in the Bavarian capital, far from the chaos of his native Badakhshan in the northeastern part of the country, near Tajikistan.

“We have permission to walk around (Munich). We feel safe,” he told ReligionUnplugged.com in a phone interview.

The Sharqs — the surname means “east” in Pashto, Persian and Arabic — are among the 271,805 Afghan refugees registered last year with Germany’s Federal Statistical Office. The exiled minister estimates the current number is 100,000 higher. Most live in Hamburg, Berlin and Munich. They are part of the diaspora of more than 5 million Afghanis who have fled their country since the start of the Soviet-Afghan War in 1979. Notwithstanding Afghanistan’s high birthrate, the population has shrunk to an estimated 32 million.

Sharq is beseeching the international community to save his country from ruination: “Please help the Afghani people. It is a crisis for the world. Having wasted billions of dollars, the United States has replaced the Taliban with the Taliban after 20 years. We are in poverty and darkness. The world should help us bring justice and freedom.”

The author of two Farsi-language books about politics, Sharq is currently completing a novel about life under the Taliban he began during months of hiding in Jalalabad and waiting in Tehran for Germany to approve his request for asylum. He hopes the royalties will support his family while he studies for his doctorate in international relations. He clarified, “Now we do not have a government in Afghanistan.”

In the short term, he is looking to rent an apartment in Munich and study German, Russian and Turkish. But his country’s looted patrimony remains his obsession.

Asked about the siddur, he insisted, “It belongs to the people of Afghanistan.

“Return the treasures to Afghanistan. It is related to the country’s culture. If something like the (Hebrew) book was in Afghanistan illegally, we would return it. The Bible Museum should return it. This book belongs to Afghanistan and should be returned to the National Museum."

“We want the United States to return it as soon as possible, whether there is a legitimate government or not.”

Asked about loaning the siddur to the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, he responded, “We had been deciding a way to display the books as you said (in the Israel Museum), but then the government (of President Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai) collapsed.” He confirmed those negotiations were taking place through the aegis of the New York-based American Jewish Committee.

Calling Afghanistan today the “worst situation,” he added, “I am very worried these treasures are not safe.”

Today Sharq’s war-scarred country is almost entirely Muslim. The majority of residents are adherents of the Sunni Hanafi school, while nearly one-third are followers of Imami or Ismaili Shia Islam. But mountainous landlocked Afghanistan once dominated the caravan routes linking Europe and East Asia and, as such, has a rich multi-faith heritage dating back millennia.

To deny the history of his Central Asia homeland and its material culture is criminal, he said: “This is anti-Islam.”

The 1,200-year-old Siddur in the collection of Washington, D.C.’s Museum of the Bible may have been stolen from the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul in 1998. Photo by Ron Cogswell/Creative Commons

The Hebrew prayer book under investigation at the Museum of the Bible

The National Museum of Afghanistan was established in 1919 at the former Bagh-e Bala royal palace overlooking Kabul. Following the outbreak of Afghanistan’s civil war in 1992, the institution was repeatedly shelled. It suffered heavy damage in a May 12, 1993, rocket strike. The combination of Taliban mortars and looters resulted in the loss of 70% of the 100,000 prehistoric, Hellenistic, Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Islamic and Jewish objects once in its collection. Those pilfered artifacts flooded antiquities markets in London, Paris, New York, Jerusalem and elsewhere.

Among the treasures the pro-West government of President Ashraf Ghani — formerly an anthropology professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland — was seeking to repatriate was a 1,200-year-old siddur, the world’s oldest Hebrew manuscript after the Dead Sea Scrolls. But then the Taliban toppled Ghani’s government shortly after U.S. troops were withdrawn.

Last April, in the first-ever on-the-record interview between an Afghani official and an Israeli journalist, Sharq argued photos of the ancient siddur in Kabul’s National Museum dating from 1998 contradict the documents provided by the Museum of the Bible in Washington — a scandal-ridden institution established in 2017 by billionaire Steve Green, the Oklahoma-based president and main funder of the Hobby Lobby craft store chain, who envisioned the museum would further his evangelical Christian agenda. The MOTB says it bought the priceless siddur in 2013 from antiquities dealers in the U.K., who provided provenance papers showing the manuscript had been in Britain since the 1950s. The museum paid $2.5 million for the prayer book. Though Sharq appraises the unique volume at $30 million for insurance purposes, it truly is priceless, he said.

The prayer book may have belonged to the Radhanites, a little-known group of medieval merchants — some Jewish — who traded along the Silk Road linking Christian Europe, the Islamic world, China and India during the early Middle Ages. The Radhanites’ entrepôts and the local Jewish community were likely destroyed in 1219, when the Mongol Empire occupied Afghanistan as it spread from the steppes of Mongolia to Europe and China.

Responding to a query in 2021, the MOTB’s chief curator, Jeffrey Kloha, said the museum would share results of an investigation of the siddur’s provenance when completed. A year later, no report has been issued.

Read ReligionUnplugged.com’s earlier report for more context on the Museum of the Bible’s controversies: READ: Exclusive: Kabul Wants Allegedly Stolen Prayer Book From Museum Of The Bible

The Hebrew tombstone of Zakkai ben David Yosef Salomo, who died on Iyar 7, 1502 (of the Seleucid era, corresponding to April 14, 1190) found in Afghanistan's Samangan province in 1957, photographed in 2019. Photo courtesy of Richard Steinberg

Contents of Kabul Museum under the Taliban unknown

Hidden in the basement of the Kabul Museum is an irregularly-shaped 70-centimeter tombstone inscribed, “Zakkai ben David Yosef Salomo died on Iyar 7, 1502” — of the Seleucid era corresponding to April 14, 1190 — noted Richard Steinberg, a Canadian-Israeli who worked as a logistics security contractor at numerous locations across Afghanistan and Iraq for 14 years. The “matzevah” (“grave marker”) was uncovered in an archeological dig in Samagan province in the Hindu Kush Mountains in 1957. A reference to the tombstone was published in an academic journal in 1964, after which it vanished.

A trove of Judaica may be secreted away in two other locked warehouses in the basement of the Kabul Museum, Steinberg suggested. He learned of the Afghan Judaica from Jerusalem antiquities dealer Lenny Wolfe, who in the last decade was instrumental in acquiring the Afghan Geniza for the National Library of Israel, together with Shaul Shaked, professor emeritus from the faculty of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In 2019, Steinberg and Wolfe were able to get Jason Russell — a former British SAS officer who spent several years as a security specialist in Afghanistan — to photograph the tombstone. Their efforts to get an export permit to loan the Judaica to the Israel Museum collapsed with the Taliban takeover. In the quid pro quo deal, the Hebrew University, under the auspices of Shaked, would have provided Afghanistan's Ministry of Culture with academic and archeological experts to decipher ancient Islamic items the ministry had not been able to properly evaluate.

Gil Zohar was born in Toronto, Canada and moved to Jerusalem, Israel in 1982. He is a journalist writing for The Jerusalem Post, Segula magazine, and other publications. He’s also a professional tour guide who likes to weave together the Holy Land’s multiple narratives.